![]() You should be aware, however, that if you want to take full advantage of all the features that come with Philips Hue smart lighting products, you’ll still want to buy a Philips Hue Bridge. If you’re a smart home first-timer, you won’t find anything easier. And in less than 15 minutes, I had paired these Zigbee products to the Echo and created a routine in the Alexa app that turned the smart bulb on and tuned it to a warm white when I separated the two pieces of the sensor (simulating a door opening by breaking the magnetic field between the two parts). In fact, Amazon sent an Ecolink door/window sensor and a Philips Hue White and Color Ambiance smart bulb along with the speaker for this review. The new Echo has an onboard temperature sensor, too. But Amazon further strengthened its smart home bona fides by building a Zigbee radio into this Echo, so you no longer need to step up to a “Plus” model to get a true smart home hub. But in a three-way comparison with the Nest Audio and the Sonos One (which, I should note, costs twice as much as either of its competitors), the Echo comes up just a wee bit short, as I’ll discuss a bit later. The recent introduction of the Nest Audio leaves Amazon in third place behind Google in terms of audio performance (don’t forget the powerful Google Home Max).Īmazon continues to make strides in terms of audio quality, and the fourth-gen Echo sounds very good, especially if you like your tunes leavened with bass. ![]() Two things haven’t changed: The Echo (and Alexa) remain our favorite tools for smart home control, and the company still trails Sonos in terms of building smart speakers that sound great. ![]() ![]() The fourth generation of Amazon’s Echo smart speaker marks a radical departure in industrial design, ditching the familiar columnar form factor of previous iterations for something that looks for all the world like a child’s bowling ball. ![]()
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